Alexandra Munroe

Samsung Senior Curator of Asian Art

Guggenheim curator since 2006

Alexandra Munroe, Ph.D., is Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. A pioneering authority on modern and contemporary Asian art and transnational art studies, she has led the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Initiative since its founding in 2006 while also working on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum and the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. She convenes the museum’s biannual Asian Art Council, a curatorial think tank, and heads The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation initiative in contemporary Chinese art.

Munroe has organized the award-winning and critically acclaimed Guggenheim exhibitions Gutai: Splendid Playground (2013, co-organized with Ming Tiampo), Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity (2011), The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 (2009), and Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe (2008). Other exhibitions and publications include Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective (1989), The Art of Mu Xin (2002), YES YOKO ONO (2000), Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (2005), organized with Takashi Murakami. Her groundbreaking survey and textbook Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994) is recognized for initiating the field of postwar Japanese art history in the United States. Her exhibitions and scholarly catalogues have received top awards and recognition from the Association of American Art Museums, International Art Critics Association, College Art Association, Association of American Museum Curators, Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA), and China Art Powers. In 2008, The Third Mind received the Chairman’s Special Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Raised in Japan, Munroe is former Vice President of Japan Society, New York, and former director of its museum. She holds a BA from Sophia University, Tokyo, an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and a Ph.D. in History from New York University, where her research was in modern East Asian intellectual history. She serves on the advisory boards of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; and UCCA, Beijing. She is a trustee of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and the United States-Japan Foundation, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, New York.

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